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“Many businesses are already using Pinterest–a social media website that lets people save (or “pin”) pictures in titled collections–to raise awareness of their brand and drive traffic to their websites. But it’s also a powerful tool to create a vision board, meaning a collection of photos and short phrases that represent your business goals.

“The purpose of a vision board is really to get you to focus on what it is you’re striving for,” explains Marcia Layton Turner, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vision Boards (Alpha, 2009). “In a way, it could be used as a visual business plan.”

Unlike a business plan that gathers dust in a drawer, this collage of photos is meant to be looked at daily. “Through pictures, [a vision board] focuses your mind,” Turner says. It helps you notice opportunities and stay on the path to success.

Though vision boards are nothing new, Pinterest allows you to take them to a whole new level. Not only do you have access to millions of photos, you can engage followers, store useful links, and drum up public support. Follow these four tips to create a Pinterest vision board that will help you reach your goals: ” …..

“So if interest-based social networks focus first on an individual’s interest graph and Facebook centers on an individual’s social graph, which service will be the winner?

Both.

Humans are inherently social creatures, and we define ourselves both by the people we know and our interests. We make decisions about where to eat, what to buy, where to visit, etc. based on a complex matrix of social relationships, past experiences, location, long standing interests and future goals. Today’s platforms approach our lives from different angles but both are integral to how we define ourselves and interact with the world around us.

There are opportunities to establish differentiated, sustainable social media brands with large, passionate audiences. Much like the modern day media disrupters (e.g. ESPN or HBO or CNN), these services can establish new social media networks that are differentiated and unique, protecting them from the inevitable concern that they get squashed by Facebook. The traditional “Big 3 networks” (NBC, ABC, and CBS) used to be the only properties that really mattered, similar to how some view Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in today’s social media landscape. Emerging networks will be the new media brands and properties that augment social networking and media.

At the same time, the rise of these new interest based social networks does not really threaten Facebook, in fact, they are more likely to benefit Facebook. Specifically, Facebook has evolved itself brilliantly into not only an end user application drawing near to 1 billion accounts but also a robust, powerful platform other apps can leverage in order to drive more users to their services. Pinterest, Instagram, Fab, and many others have adopted Facebook’s Timeline API for precisely the reason of wanting to raise awareness of their services and drive more users to their sites. As these new services grow, more content gets pumped back to Facebook, Facebook’s platform gets more robust. Wash, rinse, repeat… Facebook’s positive feedback loop gains more momentum, and becomes more powerful.

In the words of Marc Andreessen, “Software is eating the world”, and in the world of social media, there is, for now, plenty of world to go around.”

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“The social enterprise has been growing as more and more companies look to incorporate Facebook-like communications among workers. Jive (which just debuted on the Nasdaq), Yammer, and Salesforce are all betting on the social as an integral part of productivity and business processes in the future. And it looks like Google will be entering the space soon. Google’s Vice President of Enterprise Amit Singh tells us that Google will soon bring a more in-depth Google+ social experience to businesses and institutions using Google Apps.

In October, Google announced that Google Apps users could sign up for Google+, allowing businesses and educational institutions to share posts directly to other users within their workgroups and/or universities.

But Google has further ambitions for Google+ in the enterprise, says Singh, and that involves creating a collaborative environment for businesses. Internally at Google, Singh says that the company is already using Google+ as a collaboration platform and it’s going well. “This can become a new social platform for collaboration across Docs, Gmail, video and other apps,” he explains.

Singh explains that there’s a shift towards moving from individual productivity based applications to more social applications, and this is only going to accelerate. Part of 2012 will entail bringing the Google+ social experience to businesses.

“Google+ is the next big thing for the enterprise,” he says.” “We are going to do the same thing with Google+ that we’ve done with Gmail, and other consumer-facing apps so that Google+ can be adopted in more of enterprise setting.”

While Singh says the specifics of how this is going work for businesses with Google Apps is still being developed, he says that in 2012 Google will offer “some good choices for businesses to take advantage of both internal and external communication capabilities.”

Google entering the social enterprise market isn’t particularly surprising considering the search giant’s ambitions when it comes to social. In terms of usage, Google Apps is a major product for the company (Apps now has 40 million users, and 5,000 firms are joining per day, as per Eric Schmidt). What should be interesting is how Google’s communications and collaboration platform for Apps will affect the current leaders in the market such as Jive and Yammer. Stay tuned.”

“If you have been on Twitter for a little while, I am sure you have built up quite an archive of tweets. They may vary from random thoughts to pictures from interesting adventures you have been on. Whatever it is that is mesmerizing your followers, I am sure you have no idea what to do with your tweets once they are out of the public’s eye. Are they just going to sit there in your timeline with little or no attention given to them at all? If you look at it from a status update point of view, I am sure they will, but there are other ways to put your old tweets to good use. Namely, you can create some stunning art with them.

There is a new service that launched not too long ago which will take your tweets and make artwork out of them. It might sound a little weird, and I have to admit that it is anything but ordinary. This new service called Firebox will let you create a picture out of your tweets and your profile picture. So if you have at least 230 tweets, £24.99 and a profile picture on your Twitter account, this service will automatically process it all into a really unique picture which I am sure you can use as your new profile picture.

It’s one of those things that you will just have to try in order to see if it suits you. This way, your profile picture will be one-of-a-kind and unique. There are all kinds of examples for you to see ranging from Lady Gaga to Ashton Kutcher, so you will have a good idea about how this looks when the process is all finished. If I may say so myself, I think it’s pretty darn creative. However, I am indecisive when it comes to whether or not anyone would be able to tell that it is a unique kind of Twitter profile picture once it has made into a small picture gracing your profile. Then again, you are able to click the profile picture and get a larger sized image, so maybe this will work out just fine in the end anyway. It is a really creative way to make your account just a little less ordinary, and it will give your profile picture a personal touch.”

“It is hard not to read the obvious: Who would be more gobsmacked by the implications of social media—the prospect of everyone constantly talking to one another without an arbiter, mediator, or censor—than a citizen of the former Soviet Union? Likewise, who would see it as more revolutionary and valuable?

That is the singular insight that transformed Milner and through which he is transforming technology finance: It seemed worth more to him than to anybody else (at least anybody else with money).

In a way, he is to social media what Michael Milken in the mid-’80s was to many non-credit-worthy companies. Like Milken, Milner, in part through the lens of his own life’s experience, saw another level of value entirely—if the world was being transformed by social media, it was more valuable than anyone thought. And, too, if technology companies had reached a certain level of value, that was a pretty good indication of their permanence.

Accordingly, he upped the ante and put social media and himself at the center of technological development.

Indeed, there is a different or further mission. He’s more beholden, he’s more in awe, than the Silicon Valley establishment—blasè9 or cynical as any other establishment—is of its geniuses. There is always something vaguely oppositional about the relationship VCs have with the companies they invest in. They are trying to maximize their positions, to pay as little as possible and cash out for as much as possible. Milner—now the singular link between the major players of social media, Zuckerberg at Facebook, Mark Pincus at Zynga, Andrew Mason at Groupon, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, Daniel Ek at Spotify—is not thinking about individual deals but is aligning himself financially and strategically with the founders and reaping the benefits. Already, he competes with the topmost VCs in terms of personal wealth, and he is arguably now more important—Milner is setting the price.

Next year, in Scotland, Milner tells me, he will host a gathering of all the Internet companies in the world that have a valuation of more than $1 billion—he is setting the agenda, reordering the power structure.

In a sense, the elites of Silicon Valley have a good reason to be suspicious of Milner. He has stolen, or at least moved, the center of their world.”